Blame the Young'Uns

In October 2006, my home town tab a harrowing feature story dealing with “binge drinking” (a phenomenon often associated with teens). Because in civil society it is proper for all human beings to exhibit concern for all other members of society, this feature had many elements of appropriate coverage. On the other hand, it also bore markers of special interest. I submitted a letter – which turned out to be too long to fit the length protocol for The Independent, the town’s superb local newspaper—pointing out ways to put this issue into context, at least from my perspective.

I have since sent a much shorter letter to that newspaper. The original text is below.

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Letter to the Editor, The Independent, Lafayette, Louisiana

Kudos for Leslie Turk’s wonderful coverage warning parents about the problems of alcohol abuse, and other binge behavior, especially among young people. Abuse of alcohol can cause predictable, well-defined, and profound health problems costing individuals and the community millions of dollars each year. The Independent has performed a timely public service alerting the public to the painful minority effects of our boon companion, alcohol. Still, I do think a few extending comments might be made.

While no one could continence abuse, readers should know that the overwhelming majority of drinkers actively benefit from the consumption of alcohol in their lives & diet. Most of the time, for most people, alcohol contributes strongly to a healthy and happy lifestyle.

Keep in mind that while about 400 people a year do die from alcohol poisoning, about 20,000 die from the common, every-day flu, over 40,000 die in vehicular accidents—any many, many more are badly hurt. Indeed we so love our cars that in 1981 when a presidential task force totaled damage from different crimes, vehicular manslaughter (in fact responsible for perhaps 13,000 deaths) wasn’t even on the list. Cigarettes, the real stalking horse, slays a staggering 300,000 to 500,000 human beings, all dieing from tobacco related illnesses or complications.

From a numbers point of view, if you let your teen smoke, or drive, why worry about drinking? In fact, maybe we should worry about what worries us: while communities struggle to find pennies to fund basic preventative health care facilities or domestic abuse centers, the nation spends billions “defending” us from terrorists, yet it’s more likely that an American will be hit by lighting or die from a bad peanut than be killed by a terrorist.

Maybe Lafayette is down to dealing with the quite tiny risk factor of alcohol poisoning? Perhaps sound anti-smoking regulations are in place, parents don’t let kids drive frivolously, the advice of Dr. Thibodeaux has been followed about the benefits of smaller classrooms –in this case lowering the chance of vectoring flu pathogens—and so on. I’d hate to think folks are carping on alcohol just to give voice to religious extremists.

Indeed, we even know that “participation in eight common types of recreational activities leads annually to more than 2 million medically treated musculoskeletal injuries in children aged 5 to 14 years. Many of these injuries could have been prevented if current safety guidelines and protective equipment had been used.” Adults perhaps should prioritize risk intervention based on reason, and avoid motivations toward social control by special interest groups.

It is important to remember that many millions of Americans receive the well-documented positive health benefits, in addition to social enjoyment, of routine moderate addition of alcohol in the diet, most especially red wine. Regular drinking is not just acceptable; it makes a positive contribution to health.

Although the data is not in yet on how chemistry (including alcohol) works on the developing brain, we do absolutely know that the way to “train” young people into moderation is by learning in a family setting. Few family meals involve “binge” drinking.

Importantly, the claims repeated in text: “teens who drink are more likely to be sexually active and have unsafe, unprotected sex; that half the drowning deaths among teens are alcohol related; how alcohol use increases the chance of them being involved in a homicide. Or committing suicide” are very, very deeply contested or even misleading. I believe the people who use such “motivating spin” are sincere, but I don’t think these “factoids” could stand much rigour. The claims may indeed be false.

Put another, more important way, have young people generally been unimpeachably informed about human sexuality in school? Or, more appropriately, by parents? Do young people have the information necessary to make good decisions about drink and sexual and other activity?

Or have they been kept in some magnitude of ignorance? Are condoms easily and plentifully available to young folks? If not, drunk or sober how can they have “protected” sex? We know at least 25% of 15 year old women ARE having sex. Do Lafayette area schools, public and private, offer the new vaccine against human papillomavirus (the main cause of genital warts and cervical cancer)? Vaccines for Children, the Federal program which offers it cheaply, cuts off funding after 18.

So, if the schools don’t offer good sex education, if means of “protected sex” are not available, if opportunities for vaccines are not offered, it’s fatuous for “experts” to rattle on about “binge” drinking being the boogie man, is it not? Adults have access to all of that; they make the “rational” decision to make it available or withhold it. That decision process places young people in or out of jeopardy, prior to any action taken by the young folks themselves.

Again, thank you for a fine article, especially when the focus was on the appropriately narrow problem of alcohol abuse.

Please do keep up the very good work of a locally owned newspaper.

Thank you

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Snow Country Like Japan

We had been visiting Suziki Bokushi’s snow country; the region in present Niigata Prefecture which receives the moist Siberian current’s wind and, when slid up the spine of jagged mountains, converts it to snow—a dozen or more feet of it. Bokushi’s charming narrative of the local’s stories and means of living in this white world, Hokuetsu Seppu, was translated as “Snow Country Tales” (and was source material for Yasunari Kawabata’s much more widely known novel, “Snow country,” which mostly uses the folk lore as back drop for intrigue and a love story.


Now, the roads are modern, with rows of disks down the center to squirt snow removing warm water in the winter and the farmer’s once prized oxen have given way to squat, tough tractors. But the small, carefully cultivated stepped paddies still produce rice reputed to be “the best in the world.” In the old days, the tiny fields were repeatedly flooded to keep the snow off. So, as the adjacent areas were layered, again and again with snowfall, the farmers could be seen going to work with ladders, necessary to climb down ten or 12 or 14 feet to the prepared seed beds below.

Long winter months fostered indoor craft, as you might imagine. While in the prefecture, we spent some time examining the design and setting of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples—shrines are always Shinto and temples are always Buddhist. The shrines we visited were also usually smaller, simpler, set in a copse of trees, through a dignified usually red post & lintel “gate,” or torii with an arrow-straight approach—none of this “meandering curves to increase visual interest” stuff for these folks. Our hosts for our holiday, friends and colleagues with a “cottage” in the mountains, noticed our interest. We are all interested in what the Japanese call “mingae” or folk crafts.


Jocelyn and I had described earlier work we’d done, reporting on Louisiana’s program to collect alligator eggs, distribute them to commercial ‘gator farms, and monitor the eventual release of a portion of the healthy young back into the wild. This work guarantees a better fit with the optimum carry capacity of available habitat and supports the regional economy, since the skin is a valuable export product. We “followed” a Louisiana alligator skin through the process to a tannery in rural France, an international sales fair in gay Paree, distribution depots in a couple of places in Italy and then, perhaps most interesting for us, to a wonderful fine craft cottage industry shoe maker who brought into being the designs of Manolo Blahnik.
Prior to that experience, even watching Sarah’s gams on “Sex In The City”—as Carrie Bradshaw-- it was hard to see how a shoe—each shoe—could be worth $500 (or a grand a pair). Blahnik, from Santa de La Palma in the Canary Islands, makes a solid line of dependables, a little less avant guard, for $300 a pair, too. He does it all, from sketching the idea in swift strokes of his Tombo Japanese Brush pen (a favorite of Manga artists) to cutting the heel.


However, driving with Geraldo, a suave skin merchant in North Italy to the “shoe town” near by and hearing about the level of craftsmanship and the cost at each step, so to speak, and then watching the torturous process as each tiny bit of alligator hide was gently persuaded, tapped, glued, bradded, stitched, or caressed into its place—all without surface blemish--made us believers.


In Japan, we’d seen beautiful kimono, often displayed on a wood rod after the fashion of fine art. They can be very expensive; finely tailored and created in elegant fabric. Suzuki Bokushi’s home town has also been known for making silk kimono textiles. (In Kawabata’s novel the woman about to become a geisha lives in a former silkworm loft when she is having the fatal affair.) Like the superb luxury of fine alligator shoes, once you appreciate the enormous complexity of the process of creating a traditional silk kimono, the asking price no longer seems remarkable—a thing to remark upon.


Just a few blocks from a fine little museum which celebrates the scribe’s life we stopped to visit a silk weaving center. On one table at the silk kimono cottage factory, as examples, we saw a plate of marshmallow-sized silk bolls, spun by that unique caterpillar, specially fed on mulberry leaves; a bug whose husbandry goes back into dim antiquity. Best known for fine fashion wear today, silk was widely used as early armor (a feature unmentioned at the cottage factory). The fibers are so tough that “stand off weapons” such as arrows, darts, or fleshetts, would push the tightly woven cloth into the wound rather than cut through. This fact made it much easier to remove the projectile and very much reduced infection. The only “slings and arrows” most of us face now are of mere outrageous fortune of dumb luck, and neither fine silk nor ice-cream colored polyester leisure suits guarantee much protection.


The hair-tiny worm filaments are combed into threads, and threads twisted into yarn. In the small factory, we could watch a row of “spools” (paper rolls about as big as one’s calf wrapped with yarn) being uncoiled onto a long wooden frame. The yarn mistress placed a tea saucer on top of each spool, very much like the bail of a spinning reel, to control and “open” its loops as the stuff came off the roll. Back and fourth she walked, to bundle the gathered bunch collected from 20 or so spools, each managed by its own saucer, the thread sliding gracefully around the slick, glossy edge.


The weaving of the textile is done with a machine having the same attributes of a hand loom but, if you imagine, for example, the Turkish kilim loom (or other rug looms) being massively built, squarish, tall and reminiscent of an upright piano (though, of course, bigger), the Japanese silk kimono loom is much more lightly constructed, narrow and long, reminiscent of the bowling game in an arcade---it has a very long bed. As is typically the case, a bullet-shaped cock is shot one way and then back as the long yarns or threads are raised and lowered, usually with a foot treadle; it trails the horizontal threads in its wake.


In short, this is a great deal of hand work, by skilled, attentive crafts folk, exactly as was the case with the production of the luxury goods we saw in Italy. Indeed, chatting with a designer handbag maker in Milan he showed us a loom there perhaps 10% the size of the silk kimono fabric one: it created the special gold material for his purses. There is essentially no way to reduce the process or simplify the procedure and maintain the integrity of the creative moment of these truly luxurious goods.

Field Notes: Weaver Birds

Eyeballing The Birds

Japan, as you almost certainly know, is a long archipelago located in the northwest Pacific Ocean. Being longitudinally elongated, the island matrix covers a reasonably varied climatic range; from the boreal, or coniferous, to a kind of sub-tropical type. There are also considered to be two ecological lines dividing the country’s flora and fauna, its plants and animals: the Blakiston Line (between Hokkaido and Honshu) and the Watase Line lancing through southern Japan.


As a result, Japan’s “avifauna,” or birdlife, is incredibly rich—although this is in comparison with Europe not necessarily with, say, the Atchafalaya Basin – which alone hosts perhaps 200 species. Thus, about 600 species have been recorded to date in all Japan (it is unclear how many may have been lost or will be lost to heavy industrialization and the incredible concretization of habitat in the nation, an ongoing concern). Because most of these species are migratory (more than 60%), with about 60 endemic or sub-regionally endemic, including the internationally famous Okinawa Rail, Blakiston's Fish-owl, Japanese Murrelet, Red-crowned Crane, Prier’s Woodpecker and Width’s Jay, flyway habitat is vitally important.


The largest nature conservation NGO (non-government organization), the Wild Bird Society of Japan, claims a membership above 50,000 and there are of course birders who don’t belong to any organized group. If you are curious, as of 2005 the number of species formally listed in Japan was 623, with endemics enumerated as the:
Copper Pheasant Syrmaticus soemmerringii Japanese Woodpecker Picus awokera Okinawa Woodpecker Sapheopipo noguchii Japanese Scops Owl Otus semitorques Okinawa Rail Gallirallus okinawae Amami Woodcock Scolopax mira Ryu Kyu Serpent-eagle Spilornis perplexus Lidth`s Jay Garrulus lidthi Ryukyu Minivet Pericrocotus tegimae Amami Thrush Zoothera major Izu Thrush Turdus celaenops Bonin Honeyeater Apalopteron familiare Japanese Skylark Alauda japonica.


South Louisiana is blessed with an enormous wetlands area, the Atchafalaya Basin, an extraordinarily verdant region and flyway for avifauna, home to those 200 species of endemics, including playing host to ½ of America’s migratory birds. It has been a long-time struggle to save the Basin from ruination, but some of the best of Louisiana’s folks have been putting up the good fight.
Aside from the feathered bi-peds of Japan and in the United States, I’ve seen some of the most interesting birds of my life thus far in Southern Africa. Suspended from the tiny tip of a twig way at the end of a yarn-thin branch, extending from an itself slender limb of a bristling thorn tree, I spent hours watching weaver’s nests bob—the nests, not me.
"No uninvited guest, ‘dinner’ guest at that, much bigger than a butterfly is likely to lite on that nest," I’d think, marking a quick entry in my notebook.

Africa, I read later, is home to more than fifty types of weaver birds, and India hosts a dozen or so more. I don’t know yet if there are any weavers in Japan. In spite of frequent similarities, the weaver birds are prone to fascinating variety. They tend to be active "anters," for one thing. They will clutch up an ant and apply it vigorously to their plumage. No one is exactly sure why.

Still, as a group, they are probably most famous for weaving their chicks a good, solid nest. I watched a bright yellow, black-faced Masked weaver, Ploceus velatus, swoop in, with a flick, to cling upside down to the woven nest I'd been keeping an eye on near a foot path not that far from down town Habarone, capital of Botswana. Near by, a handful of other small nests, all about the size of large grapefruit, were similarly sited with offspring security in mind.

For five dollars (US) I could pay one of the beautiful Zimbabwe hookers to model nude for me in the scrub, and practice my drawing. Or, for free, I could take field notes of the weaver birds. Life is always full of such difficult decisions.

In any event, I did often choose to take notes. One creature landed, immediately his caterwauling began: an insistent call, demanding the attention of females. Distinctive parts of the call sound to my ear like the rapid metal-to-metal tapping of a tack hammer on the end of a dangling steel rod. Although sometimes they just hang while calling or perhaps sway a bit, the suitors also frequently snap their black and yellow, narrow wings open and shut adding visuals to their audio display.

As is general with his clan, this weaver knits up a lavish home for his potential spouse, carefully building a tough yet airy nest by skilfully "weaving" fresh, flexible grass or palm fibres. At first bright green, his construction dries, like a sphere of tiny steam-bent canoe ribs, into a resilient yet wonderfully light habitation.

Some weaver birds choose to create their baskety nests above standing water to thwart predators, others set up housekeeping near protective neighbours: wasp nests or nests of bigger, aggressive birds. Really nervy weavers have taken up residence dangling beneath eagle eyries.

In Botswana, and indeed all around in Southern Africa, the weavers often have a place analogous to cardinals or robins in the United States. Their presence is enjoyed by many members of the regular population, entirely outside organized birders and biologists. Home owners try to attract them, and conversation may be about the changing locations of the remarkable, basket-like nests.

Not all nominal weavers--cone-billed, generally seed eating birds including sparrows and their allies in the family Ploceidae--are welcome, certainly. The so-called red billed weaver or dread quelea have been a scourge in East Africa. When food is fairly plentiful, usually from well into until the end of the rainy season, the attractive little birds travel in large flocks. In times of scarcity, these communities coalesce into cities on the wing with populations sometimes, terrifyingly for the farmers, into the millions.

And, just as the benefit of agriculture, with its routinized cultivation and its irrigation practices, is the maximization of food productivity for human consumers, this benefit exists for the quelea to the farmer's detriment. Quelea, settling like smoke on millet and sorghum fields, can denude them of food in an hour. Such ruthless avian reaping has stimulated the human victims of quelea infestation to reply equally ruthlessly. The pest species has been fire bombed, air assaulted with powerful toxins, net trapped, and suffered roost after roost put to the torch. None of these brutal methods serve the desired end: the vast hordes still arrive to chow down on hundreds of tons of agricultural produce.

Buffalo weavers of East Africa use press-gang tactics, adolescent non-breeding males helping build group nests from thorny acacia twigs. Each member of the dominant bird's harem gets an individual brood chamber. In Kenya, the communal nests of the white-browed weaver are fashioned with two openings in order to frustrate would-be predators.

Obviously, among many weavers, nests have taken on deeply social and physiological implications. Once the male masked weaver has selected a site--and unlike some cold climes when the short breeding season demands quick action, the climate in Botswana allows great indulgence--he turns out a nest. Then he literally hangs around whistling at the girls.

It's generally assumed that females, who certainly scope out the guys in the fashion of teenagers around a poolside, use the colour of the nest as an indicator of competence. Young males must devote a meaningful period to practising nest construction before entering the mating fray. In any event, a complete nest finished and still green may signal quickness, health, and dexterity--to say nothing of enthusiasm. Golden brown, drying nests are scorned.

Written sources sometimes say the female weavers will unweave nests they particularly don't like (because these things are tight, this is a real chore, involving undoing the labour which went into the original weaving). I never saw this among the many Masked Weavers and far fewer Spottedbacked Weavers, Ploceus cucullatus, I observed. But nests were certainly torn up, abandoned, or apparently duplicated. Some weavers did seem to strip leaves from the twigs they intended to use, and perhaps just stripped leaves as a nervous habit—maybe this is the bird parallel of smoking at the night club?

With so many species in Africa it’s easy enough to find the nests. Often sociable, weavers frequently cluster in colonies making the nests yet more prominent. Within the nominal weavers, there's lots of variation in method, strategy, and behaviour. For example, if the Masked Weavers lean toward architecture to impress mates, the exotic Red Bishop, Euplectes orix, relies on what looks like a fuzzy, bright-red balaclava and distinctive, attention-getting fancy flights. Its unforgettable seeing the vividly red-headed Bishop flying that bobbing, up-an-down mating drill.

Although forming in colonies might be viewed as risky, advertising the bird's presence to predators, some benefits are clear. Once the hen is brooding, the nest entry may be extended, tube-like. Then, if a wily serpent stops in for a bite, its dangerous fore end is sheathed in woven grass while its end hindermost is all too vulnerable to colony-strong pecking. Usually it gets the mob's message and heads off for a less troublesome repast.

Also, the general brouhaha of a colonial group helps vivify reproduction while the many adults provide excellent role models for chicks. The sites I visited in Botswana routinely ranged from a handful of nests, some of which were invariably disused, to many dozens. In South Africa colonies of many hundreds are fairly common.

My enjoyment watching nature puts me in pretty good company. Observing, recording, and commenting on nature has been the pastime of the elite and the intellectual—as well as the goof-- since the dimmest antiquity. The entire arcade and later the whole pantheon of Greek and Roman philosophers relied on the natural world for anecdotal support, example, and metaphor. Pliny, in his famous treatise, called by wags an "ancient storehouse of error," claimed that Moose lacked knees, so were best hunted by chopping away the tree against which they slept. Aristotle relied on our general understanding of birds to define human beings as "the featherless biped."

Later, the 19th century brought about what can only be called the great, Golden Age of amateur naturalists. Almost magically, a host of factors accidentally came together to stimulate this wonderful blooming. An explosive increase in public education, buttressed by the burgeoning Sunday School movement rolled unprecedented waves of readers into being right as printing innovation brought cheap books to market.

Meanwhile labor reform reduced the work week hand in glove as the expanding rail system crept over the rural landscape like mold veining on the crust of a discarded loaf. Reliable, economical bicycles became available and hiking as a pastime gained popularity. It was easy and cheap for day trippers to shuck the urban coil and spend the day frolicking in God's wonderland--and to bring samples of it back in presses, zinc cases, and bail-topped jars. Darwin was in the air.

In the heady days of the mid and late 1800s hardly a community existed without its Geography Union, its Naturalist's Lyceum and its occasional nights hosting scientists, adventurers, and notable travellers on the lecture circuit. Best of all, even the tiny burg's natural scientists were doing, often enough, meaningful work.

Impressive collections were developed, and massive taxonomies of all sorts were compiled. With a ruthless zeal which would be wholly unacceptable today, astonishingly full sets of representative examples of rocks and minerals, mammals, fossils, birds, reptiles, plants and herbs--you name it (and back then, so did they)--were developed with which to settle or ignite countless debates spinning off from the new fangled idea of natural selection.

Today amateur naturalism is just a spectre of its former self, a shade of its halcyon past. Perhaps only bird watching maintains that rich legacy. It would be idle speculation why bird watching has continued its hold on the popular imagination, and, indeed, expanded its niche among leisure pursuits while rodent tagging and grass pressing has fallen into desuetude.

Yet, speculate we might as well.

For one thing, leisure scholars will point out that (there are scholars to study everything, and leisure is no exception), bird watching has what laymen might call "leg." Specialist call it vertical and horizontal cohesion, but it means the same.

It is supposed that human beings travel through a "life course," and that various behaviour is acceptable or unacceptable, becomes easy or difficult, is considered proper or improver at different stages in life. The vast majority of leisure options are horizontal. That is, most are closely associated with one or another place in the life course.

In addition, most leisure is vertically limited. By this the scholars mean that participation is resistant to enrichment. One can usually easily participate in more of the same, but not easily with more depth. A relative handful of leisure options do exhibit great vertical depth and horizontal robustness. Common ones are military modelling, philately, reading, walking, and of course bird watching.

WHY BIRD WATCHING?

We don't know why watching birds is as likely to enthral an individual Boy Scout on a day hike at the community reservoir as a 60 year old captain of industry with resources enough to charter an Otter in order to reach an isolated rookery. Some participants come to bird watching in youth, some later, and some at the autumn of life. All seem to be ensnared by some ineffable fascination.


The most obvious part of bird watching is watching birds; but for many, perhaps most, that's by no means all of it. Birding as a hobby is supported by a colossal text foundation and a huge social infrastructure. Even actual observation, with its quaint emphasis on counting, identifying, and listing is richly textured. Some bird watchers are primarily collectors, chitting off species. Some are engaged in understanding behaviour and thus focus perhaps on a single nest or a small section of real estate. A great many simply set up a feeding table and informally watch the antics of birds while quaffing sundowners.

Birding's text foundation, like that of philately and military modelling, is lushly rich. Birders can choose among big, beautiful coffee table books filled with heavily clayed illustrated pages, facile, basic field manuals and intimidating, thorough ornithological tombs, memoirs of lifelong field naturalists, and slender belles-lettres of sappy ain't birds grand essays. Monographs, "The Barn Owl," "Hawks," and "Weavers," are available in both narrowly scientific and broadly general, for us regular folk, species.

Many glossy magazines, in many languages, serve the birder while both university and scientific society journals, and journals by strong regional bird clubs, chink what few cracks may exist in the wall of avian oriented print matter.

At home, birders may well join the local club so that when not off on an outing, they can still ogle vivid slides, hear or discuss bird related topics, and later cool their heels during the social free for all. As a further extension, many bird clubs also foster a forward thinking, pro active policy of advocacy activity.

During holidays or vacations, birders can easily integrate their at home leisure into a new or novel setting. In fact, many birders plan holidays around birding opportunities or, for example on a business trip, enjoy an early morning birding jaunt prior to work. Bird watching is so popular that many natural settings now host professional guides explicitly shaping their offerings in concordance with the desire of bird watching visitors. Commercial bird tours are now commonplace world wide.

While golf may be described as a good walk ruined, birding, or indeed any interest in amateur natural history, is one of the very few ways that a stroll out of doors might likely be improved. Birding offers participants indoor and outdoor, local and exotic, aesthetic and practical options.

As suggested above, it's impossible for us to say just why birds are interesting to so many human beings. It's much easier for us to examine the features associated with "bird watching," and understand its success. As a leisure pursuit it is both solitary and social, it may be frivolously simple or engagingly complex, it lends itself to extreme frugality or to consumption of costly professional support, and participation is possible virtually throughout the life course.

XXX XXX XXX

All The Dead Brollys

All The Dead Brollys!


A few weeks ago a wind and rain storm lashed our town here in Japan. Of course, for the twenty-five minute walk into work I grabbed my worn, worker’s-yellow poly-sylab-space-age-micro-pore-breathable-raintight parka that has traveled with me now for years, round-and-round the world. I slipped it on and then the zipper ran a’ fowl. Fortunately, it also has long narrow rectangles of velcro to seal the storm flap, so I was able to use that to hold the thing closed in the wind.

Unfortunately, although because I’ve lived through hurricanes, including Katrina in Louisiana last year, and I know that blow was no typhoon, the storm was indeed a savage one. It left limbs down, debris liberally strewn about, and at our apartment complex a pretty and fairly substantial tree uprooted. Velcro alone didn’t do the job and the wind lashed rain saturated my shirt and pants by the time I got to my office desk. If I hadn’t noticed that obvious damp reality, pretty much each of my students kindly pointed the fact out.

None the less, as I looked around during my walk, the Japanese had been doing battle with not only the wind, tormenting them with its whipping and curling, snapping and pounding, but with the umbrellas they insisted on trying to use. Perhaps needless to say – though I’ll say so regardless – many a brolly bit the dust (although every molecule of dust had of course been scoured away by the pitiless, driving rain) that morning. For days their spindly silver ribs glinted in the unusually clear sunlight, stuck in the weirdest places.

It’s been amusing to me, sometimes, seeing how quickly umbrellas sprout during rain. Especially apparently after some invention or other a decade or two ago of a super-cheap manufacturing method which made the 3-dollar umbrella common place. Years ago we were with friends in Manhattan. We rendezvoused with them, in from Paris, us in from New Orleans. It began to rain. The merchantile-ishly astute guy said, “where are the umbrella sellers?” Back then, at first, I wasn’t sure what he meant.

Then, boom, from nowhere, hawkers were selling cheap plastic umbrellas. I don’t know where they came from nor where they went. But now they are a fixture of cities much like the Norway rat, except more useful – I don’t know how useful the Norway rat is, actually, to make that comparison meaningfully at this time. “They” tell me all God’s creatures have a purpose; if anyone knows the purpose the Norway rat serves in a bistro in Manhattan, let me know.

Anyway, a few years later my partner and I were in London, lost again, looking at a map book. We glanced around, surprised to see her surname on the classic umbrella store we had accidentally stopped in front of. Because I’d admired a so-called “shooting stick umbrella,” design in the past, I went in to check on prices (about $200 – I still don’t have a shooting stick umbrella). These brollys were very much handmade, luxury items: strong wooden or fiber-glass shafts and cloth covers, cast brass stirrups, folded heavy leather seats. Still, $200 for something that I’d probably wind up forgetting on a bus was a bit over the top. If it had had a concealed sword . . .

Some time later, by odd coincidence and accident we happened on to a French equivalence of the handmade umbrella shop in Paris. But, while most of the bumbershoots in the hoary confides of England’s redoubt were redolent in masculinity—with an obvious anal retentive quality suggested by the tightly rolled and strapped devices---the French shop was filled with padded handles, lacy edges, and frills. I’d hazard a description that it took a more feminine approach.

I suppose umbrella-like contraptions have three functions, with blurry edges some times: they communicate some social meaning, they repel water, they turn back the sun. Properly, a “parasol” involves the sun, a “parapluie” or umbrella the rain. We grew up seeing New Orleans’ Jazz funerals slinking through the streets, a handful of the, what, revelers (?) sporting lavishly decorated parasols. Perhaps such fancy brollys hailed from Africa, legacy of Portuguese days when European ladies shielded the sun with big black cloth parasols.

Certainly when I worked and traveled in Botswana it was still the custom for blacks and whites alike to cast their own shadows with wide commercial umbrellas. Hikers would lash the furled brollys into the tie-points usually reserved for ice axes, the “J” handles extending up above the back-packs behind their heads as they trekked. When I mentioned this to a Japanese student during a “brown bag,” quick as a bunny he commented that, “we could not do that here; we bow. Bowing would be uncomfortable with the umbrella tied up like that.” That was a perceptive and quickly identified cultural point.

Louisiana is a wet state. So, when in Bill Murray’s Stripe’s, that profoundly patriotic movie, during his early scene with the recruits clad in ponchos standing in a driving rain, he intones, “It is the cold and flu season,” it always gets a laugh. Ponchos were popular in Boy Scouts. Men also wore, and still wear, traditional garb like trench coats (which, by the way, must be able to button right-to-left and left –to-right, and must have “D” rings on the left hip, and buttonable binocular epaulettes to be “trench coats.” Developed by Thomas Burberry in 1901 and used in the First World War -- Burberry also invented gabardine -- the “D” rings were there to attach the heavy bags of “OOO” buck for the American 12 gauge pump guns and the hand grenades used by special “storm” or “shock” troops sent in to clear the trenches; thus “trench coats”). Today these long, heavy, exquisitely made coats cost a thousand dollars.

My wet wear preference was for a long time micro-pore breathable parkas and I’ve used the same one for a few hundred thousand miles of travel. A “parka” is literally a pretty heavy coat for cold climates, same as an anorak, but “better living through chemistry” made mine just about tissue thin and perhaps big as a book when zipped into it’s pouch. I don’t dislike umbrellas, and have owned a French wood-shafted umbrella, with a woven tip-to-grip lanyard (the French have the wonderful habit of slinging the things around your shoulder) since living in France in the 80’s.

Helen Ruggieri (through the site Hackwriters.com) spoke to the question of “Umbrella Etiquette” at some length, and it’s worth quoting – the site is also well worth a look, too, for its other groovy penetrations into cultural stuff and to read her unexpurgated essay on umbrellas.

”As with all things Japanese there is an art to using umbrellas and during the long rainy season you have time to learn it,” Ruggieri says. Then, she launches into a couple of thousand well chosen words about the Japanese, the weather, and sticks with ribs and covers.

The Japanese archipelago has a pretty well defined rainy season corresponding to summer in the States. When tsuyu baiu (rainy season) arrives in Japan, the likely choice is to grab a brolly and tough it out. The chain of islands is long and narrow which means lots of climate variety, and the conditions are not identical for urban megalopolis and rural flyspeck, but generalities can be made.

In Ruggieri’s Japan world, “given the assurance of rain (it makes the rice grow those chipper sorts squeal), you never travel without an umbrella. You always know you’ll need one. Folding umbrellas are not popular although I do see folks taking them out of their backpacks quite often. You have to fold them up and stuff them in a plastic bag. The pop-up umbrellas are favored. They pop open at the touch of a button. Quicker operation and valued for ease of use upon entering and exiting busses or taxis or other types of transportation which call for rapid movement.” Well, being from the American South, and maybe chipper, too, I just say, “great weather for the ducks,” when it rains although I don’t know if our foul, feathered bi-peds like the rain, either, on point of fact.

My partner and I live in a much smaller dwelling node than Tokyo, near a university. So, I see a disproportionate number of young people. Our human circus is filled with brolly-free runners and cycling pairs: one person peddles the bicycle, a second sits on the back holding an umbrella for the both of them – one of my very favorite sights in Japan.

But Ruggieri, apparently a denizen of Tokyo, speaks to the urban reality saying that “as with all things Japanese there is an art to using umbrellas and during the long rainy season you have time to learn it. As you walk the crowded streets of Tokyo umbrellas bob up and down as those approaching gauge the rhythm of your walk and the pace of your approach multiplied by your height. The umbrellas pass without collision as eye contact reveals our intentions. Up, down, up down. We march along in a great rhythmic bobbing stream. The dance.” She continues on to compare and contrast the difference in behavior (we both think it probably more gentle and civilized) between umbrella wielders in Japan and the US.

Still, our opinions and experiences in Asia are not always the same. I’ve seen and would describe for others the same racks, umbrella bags, and hanging railings that Ruggieri has, and noticed what I take to be similar civil behavior in the rain. But that travel memoirist says that “no one ever takes your umbrella by accident. You gain an intimate knowledge of the characteristics of your umbrellas so you can pick it out of a crowd of others – all black pop-ups.” Perhaps umbrellas are not taken by accident, but mine has been stolen to avoid being rained on – I suppose that’s taken with intent. And I’ve had umbrellas just handed to me by strangers when I’ve been walking, getting wet in the rain, and caught out brolly-less. Also, in my neck-o-the woods, while many umbrellas are indeed black, I’d venture that the cheap, see-through clear model is the most common.

”At the new Opera House in Tokyo there is an umbrella rack in the lobby to hold the thousands of umbrellas that the audience members have deposited,” Ruggieri goes on to describe. “You twist in your umbrella and lock the lever. Each one has a chit with a number on it. This isn’t to prevent umbrella thieves from making off with your parasol, but to prevent endless sorting upon exiting. You have the number so it is easy (and no charge either) to find the correct umbrella.” Well, maybe. On the other hand, maybe a rougher sort of hombre hangs out at the Tokyo opera house, lurking about ready to upgrade to a classier kind of bumbershoot!

After a couple more well turned paragraphs Ruggieri closes by describing the carnage wreaked on poor brollys by Japan’s high winds. “On gomi pick up days discarded umbrellas perch from the lips of black plastic bags, rest on the curb, in the gutter. The most creative recycling of discarded umbrellas I saw during my visit to Japan was on a small strip of land between the highway and an exit ramp. A homeless person had constructed a huge shelter of umbrellas – more like a sculpture, a work of art, a great congregation of umbrellas billowing out like a geodesic dome.” The essayist, Helen Ruggieri, wrote these comments in 2002 when her new book of haibun—haiku and prose--, Character for Women, was being released by Foothills Publishing.

Certainly more could be said about umbrellas – and why folks struggle to use the things in a fierce head wind. Or, it would be curious to know the details of umbrella use in Africa, or how the object itself was invented and then how manufacturing changed over time. For now, however, I get a kick trying to figure out how that beat up, broken umbrella got there when I see one in some odd or unusual place as I sit zipping along on the train or as I walk to work on a fine, not-rain filled day. My partner is heading to Oaxaca, Mexico in a few weeks, for some narratology field work and will stop for a couple of days at our alternate “home base” in South Louisiana. We’ve used a small tailoring shop there from time to time, including to repair my heavy horse leather king-of-the-road motorcycle jacket, replacing a brass zipper that seemed to weigh five pounds. I’ll see about having a new PPK nylon zipper put into my shell parka and get another few hundred thousand miles out of it.

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Octicreepiness

We stayed with friends in South Louisiana for a while on our last expedition to collect field notes and images for classroom use and to go galumphing and visiting. Each night we would park our expensive rented car on their drive, swing open the wooden gate to their leafy, well-treed back yard and creep under the taut strands of a huge web strung by a palm-sized, yellow-and-black “banana” spider. The tremendous, spooky thing with a body as big as the first joint of your pinky and long, long spindly legs stretched out its intricate, golden web right over the walk every night. But it was a shy, or wise, character and would secret itself away from the human hub-bub during the day.

We grew up calling these fast, frighteningly large but apparently not too dangerous creatures banana spiders, probably because of their jazzy color scheme; maybe because folks thought they were shipped in on the speedy fruit boats which used to race over the Caribbean. When time ran out and we, our own selves, raced back to Japan to get back down to business, I was delighted to see the edges of light poles, bushes along the sidewalks, & the space between the uprights of road signs filled with what looked like a slightly down-sized cousin of our Louisiana friend.
The filament thin silk of their webs catches the morning and evening sun when I make my work commute a’foot. Not being a real “bugologist,” I have no idea if these are examples of the orb spinning nephila clavata, or the argiope, both descriptions seemed close on the world wide web. The clavata are common through China, Korea, and Japan and are alternatively called “mudang gumi” which in Korean means “fortune teller” for their utility in predicting certain future outcomes based on birth circumstances.

The fruit nick name, as I read on the electronic web, may be less useful than determining success of a proposed marriage, and is actually applied to two very different species of spiders. One, the argiope of North America, is pretty passive and benign, while the phoneutria of Central and South America, same by name only, can be deadly.

Much more aggressive, the South American banana spider, or phoneutria, has a large body--typically about 1.3" (3 cm). As a rule, this one makes its home in the rain forests. However, it is fairly adaptable and can also be found in cities. As a result, between 1970 and 1980 it was reportedly responsible for the hospitalization of some 7,000 people in southeastern Brazil.

If the Louisiana banana spider’s bite has been compared to a bee sting, the South American banana spider's injection is a neurotoxin similar to the venom produced by redback or black widow spiders. One specialist noted that “a phoneutria banana spider's bite will cause immediate pain, a cold sweat and irregular heartbeat.” The spiders here on Japan spin their webs all over the bushes, paths, and sidewalks. Unlike the critters in the US, they don’t seem to hide in the day. And, many Japanese could stroll under a head-high web before I’d walk face-full into the tiny nets which are surprisingly robust---the fibers are stronger than steel or Kevlar. Even without the venom, I suspect a face full of surprised spider would give me an “irregular heartbeat” for at least a little while. Some of these things are weirdly high, way up at the roof gables of two story houses. Then, it looks as if the huge creepy thing is just floating a few meters up in the air, levitating.
The regular argiope or so-called banana spider does have venom a lot like the toxin of the black widow, but it is apparently quite harmless to humans being a weaker, less potent concoction.

You probably know that males have it rough in the insect kingdom (and it’s not exactly a skate in the mammal world, either).

Anyway, according to a couple of Canadian biologists, some spiders have about the total nadir: they have sex then die. As a recent press release, devoid of any humor, noted, "the female doesn't have to do anything," said biology Prof. Daphne Fairbairn of the University of California Riverside. "He just dies spontaneously, he curls up his legs and he just hangs there."

Here in Japan the webs are plentiful. Its very easy to see the enormous female, colorful and prominent in the big sloping construction (spiders virtually always slope their webs in order to be able to sling themselves from below with the help of hooks at the tips of their long legs thus avoiding the stickiness of the silk material) with one or occasionally two or more much smaller males near by. As the news release explains, “the male orb-weaving spider, Argiope aurantia, is a quarter the length and about one-tenth the weight of the female. The male courts by waving his legs around, approaches the female and waits until she allows him to copulate. From our perspective, the copulation is unusual in that the male's sperm-carrying organ, which is called a pedipalp, is found in its legs.” This critter, observed on Australia, inserts his first pedipalp and releases some sperm. When he inserts the second one it swells and lodges in the orifice. At that point, as the report carried in the university press release puts it, “immediately the male becomes unresponsive, his heartbeat ceases and he dies.”

To get him out, the female actually has to break off the end of his pedipalp. Other males aren't strong enough to do it. What a way to go. Fairbairn and graduate student Matthias Foellmer of Concordia University in Montreal studied 115 matings to document what happens. "He's really acting as a whole body mating plug if you will, or a chastity belt," Fairbairn told CBC Radio's As It Happens. That’s pretty straight forward, after all, since you can see the benefit DNA wise. But over the week end we took a hike in the hill side near Tokyo and the foliage was alive with the vivid yellow and black spiders, with the reddish torso. Colorful plumage may help attract mates yet in this case the mate is about 5 body lengths away. He’s pretty much already attracted.

“Like the glitter and glare of Las Vegas beckoning tourists to the gambling tables, the orb-weaving spiny spider flashes its colorful back to lure unsuspecting quarry into its web. The discovery of this lethal use of color runs contrary to the long-held belief that in the animal kingdom color is used generally to attract mates rather than to entice prey,” says a Cornell University animal behavior researcher. Ah, that’s what I was wondering about. You’d really think most prey would more or less skedaddle at the sight of yellow and black.

"Attraction is all casinos are about. They lure you; they want to get you there. They lure people with bright lights, cheap plane tickets, inexpensive hotel rooms, great shows and great meals," says Mark E. Hauber of Cornell's Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. "The spiny spiders work the same way." Straight forward logic might suggest that “bright colors and contrasting patterns should be rare in predators that use traps, since conspicuous body color is scientifically counter-intuitive in stationary predators, says Hauber. Generally, he says, animals use "sit-and-wait" tactics in their concealed traps to capture prey, and colors and patterns only alert potential prey. Yet orb-weaving arachnids, such as the spiny spiders of Australia, are brightly colored and have contrasting patterns on their bodies. Hauber found that the more colorful their backs, the greater their chances of catching prey.

"It goes against what most scientists would have thought. Color is an attracting feature," says Hauber. "While color on animals like parrots allows them to blend into the colorful rain forest, other animals use color to attract mates. In this case, the color lures prey to the web. Perhaps the color itself may look like flowers to the insects that eventually become entrapped in the web," he says.
This scientist did not look at the same arachnids that I’ve been pausing to gander at, use as examples in my classes, and bother my students with questions about folk tales about. And it’s not safe to imagine that one animal defines behavior for another. But it is interesting that these spiders acted this way. Hauber observed spiny spiders (Gasteracantha fornicata ) in northeastern Australia. As a kind of test, he covered the yellow-black striped dorsal surface on the spiders' backs with ink from a black felt-tip pen. When he went over the data that slowly accumulated, he saw that the spiders with the black dorsal surface caught less prey than spiders with their normal colorful stripes. The implication was clear. A “treatment” was paired with a condition, and that condition was associated with the experimental circumstance. He did that “experiment” several times. (We can also say this is why “science” is not, as some pinheads imagine, a “religion.”) Anyway, the results gave him a pattern. Repeatedly he found that the blackened spiny spider always attracted and caught less prey.

"Perhaps the colors and patterns of their dorsal surface mimic the color of food -- such as flowers -- for visually oriented prey. It is also possible that the dorsal surface of the spiny spider is highly reflective in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum," he says. "Many flies, mosquitoes and gnats are attracted to bright light, and the kind of light rich in ultraviolet spectra, because these indicate the presence of field clearings adjacent to dense forests."

Hauber also learned that spiny spiders set their webs at an angle and that they sit on the underside of their webs with their backs to the ground. This suggests, says Hauber, that sun and nearby vegetation offer camouflage for the web. "Daytime web-building and hunting, along with the web placement and orientation, is consistent with behavior that attracts prey traveling from darker areas to lighter ones," says Hauber. Of course it’s well beyond my ken to speculate on the motivation of the many spiders we saw while hiking on that hillside an hour from one of the world’s biggest cities, rank upon rank of the webs seeming to have been sited to catch the sun more than to snag a meal. Is there any aesthetic notion to it? Or some great gearing to the chain of life?

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Found Horizons

Lhasa Adventures

Although we still consider having our emotional and professional roots in South Louisiana as a creative team, we’ve shifted work emphasis to Asia recently. Then, pretty well settled after about a semester in Japan, we spent two months circumnavigating the globe. I can’t say it was the very best time to do it, but looking at the long range calendar there wasn’t going to be a more convenient time, any time, soon.

It would have been better to take six months or more to do this, because there is a lot to see on the old girl, spinning as she is on her cold, lonely orbit. And because just crossing the lines costs so much. But time’s winged chariot hurries near, and there’s nothing to be gained by waiting for a shinier penny to fall from heaven no matter how loudly we rock it with our bootless cries.

Google says the circumference of the earth is perhaps 24 or 25 thousand miles. And although we didn’t go round those humid, plump equatorial hips, we hardly cut a bee-line. We zig zagged from Hadano to Tokyo, to Beijing to Lhasha, back to China. Beijing to Moscow, down to London and around there, over the pond to Boston then here and there around bean town. I’ve no idea how far we went. In the end we criss-crossed the US between Dallas, New Orleans, Orlando, and Chicago on business and pleasure before heading west to arrive back in Tokyo.

Because we specialize in cultural analysis and hang with Scientists and Futurists and Artists and “ists” of all ilk, we could conceive of this whole journey—the business, such as delivering an academic paper at a conference in China, and the pleasure of touching base in Louisiana -- as so-called professional development. And thus justify our hemorrhage of cash and the delay in paying that bit of our still outstanding school loans. Still, this kind of thing does take a lot of what is euphemistically called “resources,” -- time and money. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

That said, it’s popular among the pinheads today to quote Danton, hero of the French Revolution, about the benefits of audacity. He had told Frenchmen "Il faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace" (You must dare, dare, and dare again). Yet, unlike the creeps too likely to appropriate that advice because the phrase sounds good, Danton really was a hero. He really did struggle to protect the moderate voice, and to shield the innocent. Perhaps that’s why on 5 April 1794, he and his peeps -- the people with courage enough to support him --were killed by the radical element in the Revolution.

Danton and his circle were the last defenders of humanity and moderation. After them, the Terror bloomed in full spate. In spite of calling for bold action, Danton wanted moderation and peace between the victors of the Revolution and the also rans. He wanted to set the stage for the future by a show of pity for those who had been “conquered;” a display of compassion by the winners for the losers. Audacity is, at times, just the right word. At other times it’s the lighting bug instead of the lightinin’.

The misappropriation of Danton’s word’s were on my mind as we began our travel, because we had been reading about the new train in China. I thought it was a fantastic, bold engineering feat. At the same time, much of my professional life has been spent working with “indigenous groups,” helping them understand principles of sustainable tourism growth. Or, writing for these groups. The new train from China was a potential engine for economic growth, but, at the same time, it could be thought of as a conduit of social change for Tibet. On the whole, would the change be good?

I’ve been reading, and maybe you could say, dreaming about, Tibet since Boy Scouts. Pouring over those books about the ancient East. Over the years I added to that youthful reading – of course Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet and David-Neel’s gripping stuff and history about the Younghusband violent entry – more academic texts. And I moved into the study of travel and tourism. You never really know what kind of post hoc ergo proctor hoc thing is going on. What sort of situation exists such that because you do one thing, the next thing follows. I got interested in Buddhism and quest or journey literature reading the Beats in high school. Those characters went to Japan, and now I have.

The American infatuation with Tibet probably festers from the publication of James Hamilton’s Lost Horizons, the apogee of escapist reading. Not only did it introduce readers to this fantasy world, it has the distinction of being the first contemporary paperback book. Published in the thick of the depression, a time when the rich, having ruined the world economy, fought to avoid aid programs to the unemployed in the US, and helped finance men like Adolph Hitler and Mussolini in Europe.

The disenfranchised were turning to community action in their repellence with capitalism, and the capitalists were, as a response, supporting leaders who promised strong central governments: putting the unruly poor in jail where they belonged. Today self-serving pols like Donald Rumsfeld lie to the great unwashed (because too often they know they can get away with it) American voter majority, referring to the “appeasement” of Hitler. But the lie is leaving out that Hitler was in power because the rich of the US and England financed his thuggery early on, hoping that he would be a foil against communism.

In any event, Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon, failed to gain much traction until it was boosted on radio by Alexander Woollcott. Intriguingly, according to this biography, “Woollcott was born in an eighty-five room house, a vast ramshackle building that had once been a commune. It was called The Phalanx, and was in Phalanx, New Jersey. There were many social experiments in the mid-1800's, some more successful than others. When the Phalanx fell apart, due to internecine squabbles, it was taken over by the Bucklin family, Woollcott's maternal grandparents. There, amid his extended family, Woollcott spent large portions of his childhood. His father was a ne'er-do-well, a supposed Cockney, who drifted through various jobs, sometimes spending long periods away from his wife and children. Poverty was always close at hand.” Did this life experience make the famous wag more or less empathetic to the plight of the victim?

Woollcott, a member of the famous “Charmed Circle” of wits, including Dorothy Parker, which met routinely at the Algonquin Hotel, lauded the novel, originally published in October 1933. The cover showed a contemporary aircraft crashed landed on a snowy landscape, text calling: “welcome to Shangri-La.” For a vast reading audience—no TV back then—and apparently left behind by the well-to-do and government, the promise of the better life beyond the far horizon was a tempting sell. There was already a kind of rough, indeterminate focus on the region due to the slow kindle of interest in peak bagging.

Climbing of Mount Everest was, of course, the news maker. When Andrew Irvine and George Mallory were killed on a climb in 1924, the Himalayas were welded into the popular culture fore brain. (Perhaps ironically, that expedition was organized by Francis Younghusband, by then head of the RGS) Tibet, essentially a closed country, was forever more in the spotlight. Now, it seems anybody with a kettle of cash and a cell phone can walk the roof of the world. But things were different back then.

On July 15, 2006 Richard Gere (who has been a practicing Buddhist for many years and is a long time supporter of the Dalai Lama) authored a long piece in the Op-ed section of the New York Times. For Gere, there are apparently no complexities in the situation existing in China with its relationship with Tibet. He seems pretty certain of “who” is right and wrong. Certain indeed that right and wrong exist.
As Gere put it, “The opening this month of the final segment of the world’s highest railway, from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet, is a staggering engineering achievement and a testimony to the developing greatness of China. But it is also the most serious threat by the Chinese yet to the survival of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity. In the words of a well-known Tibetan religious teacher who died after many years in a Chinese prison, the railway heralds ‘a time of emergency and darkness’ for Tibet.” The well known actor and activist for a particular Tibetan agenda then paints in, by broad strokes, the other hazards of modernized rail carriage: easier transport of the military, of the civilian population, of natural resources. Of course, if one views the military as protection, that’s good. If one views tourism as an economic engine, growing tourism is good.

There is no question that the Tibetans represent a small part of the colossal Chinese population. Even if you think of all the varied minorities as a block, they represent a trivial number compared to the monolith of China – if you are willing to imagine that China is a homogenous monolith. And Gere along with most of what might be called the Hollywood Tibetests does seem willing to make that kind of division.
Gere, chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet, concludes his heartfelt opinion writing that, “Tibet’s precious culture and religion, with its principles of wisdom and compassion and its message of interdependence and nonviolence, are rooted in the Tibetan landscape and Tibetan hearts. The survival of Tibetan Buddhist knowledge in its own land is vital for the world, as well as the Tibetan people. China’s journey toward greatness must not include the further destruction of this heritage.”

The zeal with which Richard Gere writes is well explained in Orvell Schell’s Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood, a rich, insightful book full of history and social narrative. For the Chinese claim a connection to Tibet from at least back when America was fighting its Revolutionary War (and Tibetans asked the Chinese authorities for “protection” from expansionist Nepal rumbling to the West.) The violence of the fifties might be a reaffirmation of that historical connection in the eyes of the Chinese. Dates are only numbers to history’s victims.

Still, Hollywood is a great one for re-writing the ending.

While the preferred narrative of American and many European fans of the Tibetans is peace and calm, only a few weeks before, the New York times carried a related story, “Arms and Armor From Tibet at the Metropolitan Museum” by Grace Glueck, May 13, 2006. Just as Orvelle Schell spends over 300 pages in his Virtual Tibet carefully explaining how much of the West’s “vision” of Tibet is a fatuous invention of longing and desire, Glueck is right on point putting the kibosh on the notion of peaceful Tibetans.

“It's unusual to think of the Tibetans as warriors,” the art critic explains. She notes that, “this mostly Buddhist people, now ruled by China, is better known today as a deeply spiritual culture devoted to peace. But they were once fierce and, like others with turf to defend, held a vital stake in battles and weapons. Tibetan history includes long periods of heavy military activity, beginning in the seventh century. Tibet's early protector gods were worshiped as warriors, equipped with battle gear.” When we finally did travel to Tibet, not by the train after all, and we did get to examine the great monasteries, these fearful “protector gods” stuck out. Dervish like and repellent, the big statues were hardly the kind of thing to fill one with calm and feelings of peaceful quietude.

According to Glueck, the superb battle skills of traditional Tibetans were made “abundantly evident” in the then mounted exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet." In what the writer describes as “a dazzling display of Tibetan war equipment from the 13th to 20th century” the show was filled with edged weapons, tack, firearms, and armor for horse and rider.

According to Donald LaRocca, curator of the Met's department of arms and armor, who organized this show and catalog, “many objects here were still being produced and used into the 20th century.” Moreover, weapons, if not in current use, are fully integrated into the culture in spite of the pop-cult image cultivated by Hollywood. Today, the center section of Lhasha is set aside for ethnic minority Tibetan dealers (you could say, in trash and not be far wrong) in tourist souvenirs. Perhaps the most common object being sold is the ubiquitous handled prayer wheel. But very, very common are cheap copies of the weird, evil looking Tibetan edged weapons.

The Met’s show explained that “older examples were kept for ceremonial use, particularly in the Great Prayer Festival held in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, at the start of each year. Votive weapons were also placed in monasteries and temples, housed in special chapels dedicated to Buddhism's guardian deities.” We might prefer to think of Tibetans as curiously “peaceful” or “childlike,” but, perhaps unfortunately, they seem to be “normal.” Realistically, if we imagine that the Tibetans are “coerced” by the Chinese army; need they be inherently peaceful to expect to lose? On the other hand, is it necessarily the case that the investment of that kind of cash – and engineering skill—to bring into being a modern rain system is done in malice?

Anyway, the new train seemed a fantastic idea. Imagine curling up, up, up over the passes that that wacky plane in Lost Horizons crossed! Instead of seeing only the tops of cottony clouds passengers could actually see the landscape.
According to coverage on web BBC “the line boasts high-tech engineering to stabilize tracks over permafrost and oxygen pumped into cabins to help passengers cope with the high altitude.” The Chinese authorities claim that the 1,140km (710-mile) line will create major opportunities to a traditionally underdeveloped region. The BBC coverage quoted “critics [who] fear it will be used by China to assert its control over a contested border region.” In addition, they say the “railway line threatens not only the delicate Himalayan environment, but also the ancient Tibetan culture.” The fantastic train climbed to 5,072m (16,000 feet), before beginning the descent to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Although passengers were in special pressurized carriages, some reported being sick with altitude. Toothpaste squirted from tubes, stuff exploded.

The BBC coverage said that “the train carriages have windows with ultra-violet filters to keep out the sun's glare, as well as carefully regulated oxygen levels with spare supplies to combat the thin air.” It also quoted exiled Tibetan Lhadon Tethong who said that the railway was "engineered to destroy the very fabric of Tibetan identity." I was not sure if the train could destroy a social fabric more quickly than a plane (and Lhasa has and has had a very active airport for decades). Indeed, many Tibetans left Tibet for fully industrialized regions with better or other forms of education, economic opportunity, and medical care. I did not want to jump to conclusions. But. It did seem that a shift of people into the region, perhaps by train, would have a cultural effect. Then again, the shift of people out of the region, motivated by a similar desire to improve their own circumstances, might also have some effect on local area dynamics. I suppose we are not to notice if Tibetans move from Lhasa to India or London. But we are supposed to be alarmed if Chinese move to Lhasa.

For us, however, to begin to do actual field work it was necessary to make a number of visits first to Tokyo, to begin the process of applying for entry visas for China and the Autonomous Region of Tibet.